Dick Costolo, speaking at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, said that more than half of the site’s 100 million active users log in each day.

He said that 40pc of them simply read the site, without tweeting themselves.

Twitter also revealed that it now generates more than five billion tweets every month, gets 400 million unique visitors every month and said that half of its active users are mobile users.

To illustrate the site’s growth, Twitter mentioned some of the celebrities, politicians and sport stars who use the service. It revealed that 40 per cent of British MPs are on Twitter, along with 35 of Britain’s 46 police forces and 396 British Olympic hopefuls. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that the Telegraph is there too.

These days, Twitter seems to crop up in almost every news story. In recent weeks Louise Mensch MP has complained of threats from hackers because she suggested closing down Twitter in times of unrest, and cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew has spoken of the abuse he received from Indian fans during this summer’s Test series.

Meanwhile, police forces across the country have begun using Twitter to liaise better with the communities they serve, and even farmers are taking to Twitter to raise awareness of the problems of their industry, according to a recent survey.